Back Comes Byrd

September 26, 1989|By Rowland Evans and Robert Novak

WASHINGTON — While Sen. George Mitchell is winning bipartisan raves as rookie Senate majority leader, his authority is undercut by his predecessor, Sen. Robert Byrd, now chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Byrd, the first ex-majority leader in over half a century to remain a senator, did not consult or alert Mitchell when he set Democratic policy on how much President Bush's money request to fight drugs should be increased. That poses the party leader with a choice of either submitting to what Byrd laid down as Appropriations chairman or repudiating him the party's senior senator. Mitchell took the former course.

After Byrd voluntarily stepped down as floor leader, he expressed interest in running the Senate through the largely honorific post of president pro tem. That proved impractical, but he is using the Appropriations Committee as an alternative base. He has clipped the wings of the committee's traditionally autonomous subcommittee chairmen and is consolidating the power of the purse in his hands.

FOOT SHOOTING

Former Rep. Caldwell Butler of Virginia had the chairmanship of the politically sensitive Legal Services Corp. locked up until he shot himself in the foot on the abortion issue during a private meeting with a half dozen conservative leaders last week.

Butler's personal pro-choice philosophy was not enough to disqualify him. What sunk him with the conservatives was his volunteered statement that he favored using federal legal services to file a lawsuit against any hospital which refused to perform an abortion.

That was enough to cool conservative Republican Rep. Bill McCollum of Florida, who had been sponsoring Butler as a compromise for the job. "I do not think his candidacy is viable," McCollum told us. That changes Butler's status from sure thing to long shot.

ANTI-BUSH BOLL WEEVIL

Rep. Charles Stenholm of Texas, a principal leader of the boll-weevil conservative Democrats, will join arms with his party's regular leadership to oppose President Bush's capital gains tax cut and support an upper bracket income tax increase.

Stenholm is considerably more conservative than Rep. Ed Jenkins of Georgia, chief Democratic co-sponsor of the capital gains measure, and broke party ranks in 1981 to support the Reagan economic measures. But he has been courted by the new Democratic leadership team of Speaker Thomas Foley and Majority Leader Richard Gephardt, who went all the way to Texas to attend Stenholm's annual picnic this month. Stenholm may soon be named a member of the leadership, which now includes no Southerners.

Democratic leaders have enjoyed less success with the bipartisan, non-deological "timber caucus." Efforts to recruit liberal Rep. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a key supporter of the Jenkins proposal, have gotten nowhere.

PRO-CHOICE ADVISOR

Despite President Bush's staunch opposition to abortion, he is about to name as his deputy science adviser a staunchly pro-choice physician: Dr. James B. Wyngaarden, who is stepping down as director of the National Institute of Health. This is particularly disturbing to pro-life forces because Wyngaarden's prospective boss, White House Science Adviser D. Allan Bromley, also is pro-choice.